The old joke from Annie Hall comes to mind. Two old women complaining about a restaurant, one says "The food here is terrible." The other, "...and the portions so small!"

Well at least no one can complain about Hamilton's portion size. There go 1200 pages of some of the worst prose I've had to endure. Just a goddamned waste of my time because the significant story and action (which was interesting) took up less than half that length. The rest was filled with the kind of world building you might care about if you can quickly envision a litany of length by width measurements of various structures in meters. The characters were mostly superficial. Women functioned primarily as objects. There are many MANY sex scenes, which hey I can get into that, but they were soooo cringe inducing mainly due to an immature framework that my eyes hurt from so much rolling.

A sample: "...gloating at her wide-eyed incredulity as his semen surged into her in a long exultant consummation."

Good one.

Unfortunately, the final 100 pages or so were exciting and the stopping point of the first novel felt pretty arbitrary. The reader just has to face they've gotten themselves into a 3,800 page book. I have to face this. Oh god. I'm totally going to read the next book in the series.